Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski was sentenced to ten years in prison

The Lenin Court in Minsk awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Belarus this Friday Ales Bialiatski to ten years in prison for smuggling and belonging to a group organized in a case related to the NGO Viasna.

Along with him, three other activists were sentenced; his deputy Valiantsin Stefanovich, campaign coordinator for “free elections” Vladimir Labkovich and Dimitri Soloviov, according to the BelTA news agency.

The prosecution asked for twelve years in prison for Bialiatski, which he did He has been in prison since July 2021which they also accused of financing anti-government protests and tax evasion.

For his part, Stefanovich was sentenced to nine years in prison, Solovov, who was tried in absence, was sentenced to eight years in prison, and Labkovich to seven. According to prosecutors, between 2013 and 2020, all of them “together with other persons who have not been identified” formed a network that allowed them to acquire more than 800,000 Belarusian rubles (about 350,000 euros) in profits.

The investigators pointed out that Bialiatski and his colleagues did not register the organization in the State Treasury and they did not submit the appropriate documents to the authorities. Thus, they were accused of embezzling around 113,000 Belarusian rubles (around 43,000 euros). However, All pleaded not guilty..

Bialiatski won the 2022 Nobel Prize together with the Russian Memorial and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, becoming the fourth person to receive the prize while in prison. On the same day, the Belarusian government criticized the Nobel Prize and assured that Alfred Nobel was “turning in his grave” because of such recognitions.